The McCarthy family have been producing meat for over 5 generations from their base in Kanturk, close to the Blackwater Valley of North Cork. Jack McCarthy has won serious awards for his cured bacon and is one of the jewels in the Irish food producer's crown. Managing Editor Anne Kennedy reports.

Jack McCarthy is a maverick in the truest sense of the word if you take it to mean someone who shows 'great independence in thought and action.' He doesn't choose the maverick's natural choice of animal, the calf, but a large White and Landrace Cross pig, bred at Relihan's Farm in Adare which he cures with a laudable variety of flavours

Anyone who has met Jack will know that he has the tenacity of a bull in heat. His choice of quarry is not a cow, but instead anyone who understands the food he produces – his life's work. Once you meet him, if you too have a passion for food, you know you will almost certainly be attached to him for life and not just for the breeding season. As well as understanding the finer points of curing, he is generally recognised as having a very fine palate, self-evident when you taste his cures which marry complex flavours like Guinness and Cider in some while finer flavours like cherry smoke and Muscovado sugar pervade others. He sells everything from pieces of cured bacon to traditional dry cured bacon (the cured meat is always marked by the insertion of a bay leaf).

Jack's enthusiasm is catching. His Spiced Bacon won a prestigious Gold Award at the Great Taste Awards in 2005, then went on to win the title 'Best Irish Speciality', an incredible achievement that is hard to overstate. One of the judges Glynn Christian said: 'I particularly like how thick it is because it keeps it nice and tender and I don't know how many spices they have used, but it keeps changing in my mouth. It's a curious mixture but I actually think it is spectacularly good.' He has won a host of other Great Taste Awards including a Gold Award for his Spiced Dry Cured Rashers and a further two Bronze Awards for his Honey Cured Roast Pork and his Guinness and Cider Spiced Beef.

Long tradition of curing
Charcuterie in Ireland has a long history – hams were hanging in kitchen's centuries ago, salted and cured to make them last through the winter. This tradition of preserving has been continued by people like Jack McCarthy and is due for a revival for it makes food that fits all the criteria of convenience food, without the downside of synthetic preservatives and the sodium nitrate used so often in products that fill our supermarket shelves. His meat doesn't leach out white residues which burn in the pan, because he treats his meat with the respect it deserves.

What could be handier for a working person than to come home to a piece of cured bacon? It has a long shelf life so there is no waste (think of the last few rashers in the convenience pack that you're unsure of and have to throw out) and it lends itself to comfort as well as modern cooking. A piece of Jack's cherry cured bacon, cut into little lardons, its thin rind of fat rendered over heat frees up just enough fat to fry a chopped clove of garlic. A quick toss of some cooked spaghetti in the same pan in which you have cooked the bacon and you have a meal that in Italy an Irish food writer would describe as 'unctuous'. Here, however, we fill our newspapers with recipes predicated on buying poor quality bacon or ham so that the poor writers have to add in all sorts of flavourings or jarred sauces to turn them into something edible.

That's why people like Jack McCarthy are so important: they take us back to happiness on a plate. For me his rasher with its thick self-lubricating rind makes sense of a good egg. For it would be a shame when someone has gone to such trouble and care to rear a healthy happy pig, kill it, butcher it (no room for sensitivity in the real world), has  tried all sorts of cures and flavourings and combinations of spicing to create delight on our palate, it would be a crying shame to put a bad egg with it.

Good food makes us responsible. It assaults our senses, not in an aggressive way but in a way that sneaks up on you. When you taste a proper thick cut rasher, our childhood revisits us for a short time. It reminds us that those were not nostalgic times that can't be replicated. It robs us of the easy excuse that modern food processing means that meat will never be the same again. It can be and it is in Jack McCarthy's shop in Kanturk, and if we want this rich experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, then it is up to us to go and get it.

This morning I had two of Jack's cherry cure rashers for breakfast. A nice man in Laois had given me some duck eggs. The bakery down the road provided sweet soft white bread, dense and toothsome. I ate the holy trinity and when the plate was clean, I didn't get up to put it in the dishwasher which is what I would have done if I had bought my food in the supermarket. I sat, quite still, in the summer sun and I thought to myself: 'This is where I live and life is grand.' Good food pervades the soul. It is not an optional extra, or at least it isn't when for a small price, you can buy a rasher the like of Jack McCarthy's.

Our photo (top) shows Jack McCarthy and his team at his shop in Kanturk. Photo (right) shows Jack McCarthy with Christopher Novelli and his wife Bridget at the British Taste Awards.

To order look up: www.jackmccarthy.ie